jill/txt

I’ve rarely seen my blog as inordinately dull as in the last week or two. I’m off on my summer holidays on Tuesday morning, and I’ve been frantically trying to tie up all the loose ends here at work. Got through a huge stack of grading, organisational things are almost in place, etc, etc, etc, etc.

I’m really, really tired. All of me. My thoughts are sluggish and my legs feel like I walked for miles yesterday, though I didn’t, and my legs and thoughts have felt that way for days. Just as well I have several weeks of holidays coming up!

Expect more blogging in August. Enjoy the summer! I know I will.

Oh no! Humanistic Informatics is far worse at publishing than Informatics. We’re even lagging 0.02 points behind Infomedia. Karltk explains all, in good old AD&D fashion.

Here’s a job advertisement for a PhD fellowship looking at the convergence between information systems and new media in a democracy perspective - four years, 25% teaching, pay is around about $40,000 I think, and you need an MA in a relevant subject to apply. I don’t think you have to be a Norwegian resident to apply.

Have you noticed that when the audience of a presentation laughs, they all look at each other? It’s the only chance you get to look each other in the eye.

The results of the 60 second story contest have been announced! Steve Himmer won, with Charles. Some others of my favourites did very well too — go on, have a look at the whole list!

Oh, just look at the screensaver Even made. That link goes to a quicktime of how it looks, this link goes to his blog where ages ago, back in May, he explains how he did it. Kind of complicated. I must learn more of that stuff.

I would like to blog. There is no time. Sorry.

I’m acting editor for the Hypertext Criticism theme of JoDI, the Journal for Digital Information. I’ve been co-editing the theme along with Susana Tosca for a couple of years now, but this year’s Susana’s on maternity leave and has left it all to me. Since we haven’t had a specific call for papers for the theme for a while now there haven’t been many submissions, but having just sent out reviews to an author I was pleased with the system: peer review may have failings, but really, it’s pretty damn good having a system where anyone can send a paper in to a journal and have 2-4 scholars in the field provide feedback. Certainly the quality of reviewers reports varies, but when I send papers to reviewers for JoDI almost all of them respond promptly and with useful, thoughful comments to the authors.

One of the nice things about JoDI is that it tries to publish papers fast. If you submit a paper, we try to let you know within two weeks whether its accepted, rejected, accepted with revisions or recommended for resubmission after revision. I’ve got to admit that two weeks is a pretty tight deadline, and realistically 3-4 weeks is more likely, given that reviewers are busy. If the paper’s accepted it can be published immediately (or after requested revisions) and then when about five or six papers have been published, an issue is announced. I like that. It’s kind of like blogging - you don’t have to save it up for print when you’re working on the web.

The hypertext criticism theme started off being literary approaches to hypertext theory and to hypertext fiction, and we particularly wanted to find close readings of hypertexts. I still want more of them, but now I’m also thinking that reading blogs as literature or hypertext could be really interesting as well. And of course JoDI has other themes as well.

So anyway: I’d love more submissions. Susana and I were too busy to rustle up a new special issue on hypertext criticism, but we don’t need a special issue to publish papers on hypertext criticism. You can write it as a traditional paper, or using links, video or anything else that’ll work in a standard webbrowser. I can’t promise we’ll publish it, but I’ll definitely get you feedback from experts in the field! Oh, and yes, JoDI is on all those lists of peer-reviewed journals your university will give you credit for, even here in Norway.

I just had lunch with Tor Arne Fanghol, who’s the editor in charge of the internet section of Bergens Tidende, the local newspaper. It was really interesting hearing about their thoughts for the web newspape. Some interesting facts:

• They publish about 100,000 copies of the paper newspaper, but each paper is read by 2-3 people, so they figure they have about 200,000 or more readers every day. That sounds kind of high since there are only about 250,000 people in Bergen, but people read it in areas around Bergen too, and Norwegians really do read a lot of newspapers.
• The web edition has hits from about 55,000 unique computers (based on their IP numbers) daily. If you assume many of these unique computers are used by more than one person, that would lead to more readers than unique hits. (I’m going to start calculating my actual readership like that too!)
• They considered limiting access to the website in order to make web readers buy the paper newspaper. Luckily, they first surveyed non-subscribing readers. They found that many of these readers did read bt.no, but when asked what they’d do if they didn’t have access to as much content on bt.no, the readers didn’t say “buy the paper newspaper” as the journalists had expected, but rather “I’d go read a different website.” Rather obvious, especially in retrospect, and it certainly contradicts common assumptions by the media.
• They now make money off the web edition through ads, although up until fairly recently, the web edition lost money. They expect revenues from advertising on the web edition will increase more than costs in producing the web edition, but right now income is quite modest.
• They’re planning to do a lot more interesting stuff on the web edition next year.

It was excellent having lunch with a journalist (well, editor, really) who wasn’t interviewing me. Interviews are great, of course, and certainly very useful (Tor Arne knew I was right up the hill from him because he read the interview with me last weekend) but exchanges of ideas are really more satisfying. Also, lunch was most excellent.

The short paper deadline for Hypertext 2005 was just extended till June 16. Have you ever written a short paper? I love them. They’re perfect for when you never got time to write the longer paper you were thinking of, or when you blogged something cool but that probably wouldn’t really make a whole paper of its own, or if you’re just starting to think of an idea.

So you know I’m on the program committee. I’m co-chair for literary papers, that is papers about literary hypertext. George Landow’s chair for more general humanities papers. Mark Bernstein is chair for hypertexts, that is papers submitted as hypertexts, because yes, you can do that. Anders Fagerjord’s paper for the conference is written as a stretchtext, which is pretty damn cool. Look, here’s a list of the accepted full papers.

We’re going to put together a panel on blogs, and the program committee is thinking of maybe making blogs a theme or their own next year, if there seems to be enough interest. (It wasn’t even my idea!) Hypertext has a very rich history and I think it’d be great to combine the knowledge of that community with the knowledge of us bloggers.

So if you think you might like to come to Salzburg in September this year, send in a short paper! As a hypertext, if you like. Or as a 2-3 page standard paper (there’s a template with tiny fonts so really you can fit about 2000-2500 words in if you want). And ask me if you have any questions!

Today’s the last chance to take part in the 60 second story competition — it doesn’t take long to make a story, and you can win amazing one-minute pleasures! Or just go look at the 60 second stories already created.

I was walking home from work when I found this sticker. A poem? A fragment of a sticker novel? It says:

Jeg liker alvoret ditt. Jeg lukker øynene og tenker på sommeren. Du lukter godt. Hjertet veier ca. 300 gram. Jeg prøver å holde det utenfor.

which might translate as:

I like your sincerity. I close my eyes and think of summer. You smell good. A heart weighs about 300 grams. I try not to think of that.

or perhaps

I like your seriousness. I close my eyes and think of summer. You smell good. Your heart weighs about 300 grams. I try to keep it distant.

or maybe

I like your determination. I close my eyes and think of summer. You smell good. A heart weighs about 300 grams. I try to keep that separate from this.

[New try, on Thursday, after Tor Arne argued that the poem’s final line is about keeping love (the heart) outside of this encounter.

I like your sincerity. I close my eyes and think of summer. You smell good. My heart weighs about 300 grams. I try to keep it outside of this.

]

Translation is hard. Seeing stories, bits of stories, unexpected, is wonderful. I’ve seen many of the DU VEIT IKKJE KOR VAKKER DU ER stickers around Bergen in the last weeks. I’ve stuck some Implementation stickers myself. Matt was thinking of doing Brit Stick Lit, but I don’t know whether he ever did.

Do you know of more sticker literature? Do you know more about these Bergen stickers? Have you seen others?

The digital narrative contest had ninety-three submissions! There were some really cool projects — we had the meeting yesterday. It’ll be wonderful seeing how some of these projects turn out!

One of the more obviously useful sides of being the head of a department is that you get more information than you do as a lowly PhD student. And sometimes you actually get asked what you think about things, with half a hope that the powers that be will actually listen. This is a story of how that might work.

Norway has decided that information technology should be one of our strategic research areas (along with oil, oil and oil) and so the research council has drafted a program plan for a ten year program defining the areas universities and industry can apply for funding within. The program will be called VERDIKT. That means “value” and “ICT”, ICT being “Information and Communication Technologies”. Value probably speaks to the moral values of our Christian Democrat prime minister (don’t worry, despite having the prime ministership, the party has less than 10% of the votes) and also to the commerical values we’re hoping to generate. I’ve heard several suggestions as to how VERDIKT should be pronounced. I’m partial to verdikåt, myself (horny for values), but the English or French word verdict, or judgement, is another likely candidate.

Anyway, a draft of the program plan has been sent out to all the universities and other likely applicants, and the universities have sent it on down the system, where it among many other mailboxes reached mine. We’re all requested to send our comments to the University’s research coordinators, who’ll condense everything into a two page document they’ll return to the research council.

Once you’re in the system, it’s fairly transparent and apparently quite democratic, it seems. However, the hearing is not open. If you click the links from the program’s home page, you’re told you’re not authorised to view that. Luckily Google allows us to short-circuit that, so if you’re interested in what your tax money (if you’re Norwegian) is going to be spent on for the next ten years, go read that PDF.

Carsten, Hilde, Thomas, Audun, Rolf and I had a very efficient meeting about the document. My job is to write it out, preferably in short and comprehensible soundbites the research coordinator will put into the two page document from the whole university. “It’s kind of retro,” one of us said. “For the first five years 75% of the funding will go to research on wireless technologies? That’s like using a battle ram to knock down open doors!” Someone else responded, “Yeah, talk about technology-centric. The document mentions that the British have named ubiquitous computing as the “grand challenge for computing research”, but we’re focussing on the thing rather than the idea.” Yet another of us nodded to that, noting that that was presumably due to lobbying from the companies that make wireless networks and so want funding for felles utfordringer knyttet til anvendelse av trådløs teknologi, or in English, “our common challenges related to figuring out how on earth to use this wireless technology”.

“Well, whatever, at least the visions are clear,” someone else pointed out. Look, they see that the network is changing the world. Look, instead of talking about the movement from a ‘information society’ to a ‘knowledge society’ as most do, they write we’re shifting to a ‘communication society’. That’s an interesting idea.” Someone else, reading, mutters, “I particularly like this bit about creating systems that can deal with unreliable communication. I guess they mean mobile phones slipping out of the network, but what if we’re talking about people using the network?” We nodded, while noting all the things that had been left out: “There’s no art or story-telling here, but at least they’ve remember learning, that’s good,” someone said. “They’ve got accessibility, too, but it looks like they mean whether blind people can access stuff, really. What about all the other people who don’t or can’t or won’t participate in this brave new network society? What about the inclusion and exclusion mechanisms invoked by the technology?” I think we said many more things too, but these are the things I wrote down. There are many good things in the proposal. Certainly.

So I still have to write out our response. I doubt I could quite get away with writing it just like this.

But maybe, by blogging it, our ideas will have more impact than they would had we only followed the institutional channels? Doubtlessly more public discussion of research strategies would be a good thing. Why keep it within the institutions?

Kunstkritikk.no has a blog about art criticism and blogging, written by Leif Magne Tangen and full of interesting links and thoughts about what art critics blogging, or criticism in blogs, might mean. (Yes, it was finding this blog with its link to my blog that gave me the kick in the butt to actually write about Farteins hage, for instance.)

Among other things, Leif Magne links to a discussion about The State of Criticism where some of the participants have blamed blogging for the demise of traditional art criticism, though to be fair that original article also points out many positive aspects of “the diffusion of power”. Tyler Green has some interesting points, in particular noting out the myth of the golden age:

1. There never was a golden age of art critics when the world moved in lock-step with what art critics said is good and bought/museo-attended accordingly. Never was. And every story I’ve read seems to start with the belief that such a time existed. The whole question of “influence” is a canard. What is “influence” anyway? (And don’t gimme Clem — at times he acted as much like a production-determining/controlling/advising dealer as anything else.)
2. On blogs and art: There is a historical precedent for the role blogs play in the art world. What we do is quite similar to the role pamphleteers/’zines/etc. have played in conversations about art in the last 120 years. Guillaume Apollinaire, to name one example, wrote in tabloid handouts, sometimes doing no more than listing the artists who were in shows he’d seen. Freebie tabloids = blogs. Apollinaire’s columns were often sandwiched betwen patent medicine ads. Kind of reminds me of Google Ads for erotic art posters I see ’round the ‘net.

I found out about Alexandre Dumas’ personal newspaper last week. Thomas Edison’s diaries are another example of blog-like things famous people did in the olden days.

Has anyone written a pre-history of blogs yet?